From celery juice to raw food diets, we’ve seen it all. In an ever-changing world of diets, trends come and go. Among them is the controversial Snake Diet, developed by US fitness trainer Cole Robinson. It follows, who would have thought it, the diet of a snake. One big meal a day.

The goal is to make fasting a regular part of your lifestyle and to get used to a certain way of eating. According to the fitness guru’s diet plan, this starts with a detox phase, followed by a period of fasting and a maintenance phase. Read on if you want to know what’s behind the Snake Diet and if it can really help you lose weight.

What exactly is the snake diet?

The Snake Diet is designed to mimic the diet of wild animals, more specifically a snake. Accordingly, you eat one big meal a day and fast otherwise.

Snakes usually eat very large, high-fat and high-protein meals during the day and then do not eat for about 22 hours. The snake diet follows this principle.

During the fasting period, no food or calories are allowed.

Only the so-called Snake Juice (in German: Schlangensaft) is permitted during the fasting. This consists of water, sea salt, potassium chloride, sodium bicarbonate and sulfate salts. This is to replenish the electrolytes. The recipe comes from the developer of the diet Cole Robinson himself.

However, experts believe that the amount of sodium included may exceed the recommended daily allowance.

The Snake Diet promotes a proactive diet based on targeted meal times. These are quite tight, amounting to only an hour or two. According to Robinson, this diet can cure type 2 diabetes and inflammation while increasing productivity. However, these claims are not backed by research, which is one of the reasons why the diet is so controversial.

How does the snake diet work?

Before you start the actual diet, you should first fast for 48 hours. During this time, except for the Snake Juice, you are not allowed to eat or drink anything. After the first two days, you will eat low-carb, high-fat meals with lots of low-starch vegetables and moderate amounts of meat. The goal of the diet is to put your body into a state of ketosis, where your body uses fat instead of glucose as its main source of energy. This state of ketosis is often associated with the ketogenic diet (keto diet).

After your first meal, the fitness trainer recommends another fasting period of 72 hours. This time, however, in addition to snake juice, a mixture of apple cider vinegar and lemon juice is also allowed. Do you have the feeling after expiration of the 72 hours still not enough weight to have lost, recommends Robinson the chamfering time if necessary to extend.

The Snake Diet alternates between fasting and eating periods. As with any restrictive diet, you will be able to lose weight on this one. If you want to maintain your new weight, you need more than just a diet. A healthy lifestyle can help you do that.

Is the diet dangerous?

The Snake Diet was not developed by a medical doctor or a nutritionist. There are no research results to support the claims made. However, followers and fans report great weight loss success.

Nevertheless, the criticism of the diet should not be taken lightly. Alternatively, you could incorporate individual elements of the Snake Diet into your daily routine or routine that are well-tested and considered safe, such as Intermittent Fasting.

This method of fasting has been shown to help with weight loss and improve overall well-being. Some of the most popular methods include the 16:8 and 5:2 methods, as well as alternate fasting. Short-term fasting (or intermittent fasting) has been shown to increase metabolic rate by 3.6 to 14 percent, resulting in tumbling pounds.

Numerous studies have also shown that interval fasting can improve the body’s resistance to oxidative stress.

With oxidative stress, there is an imbalance between free radicals and antioxidants in the body. Over time, this can lead to diabetes, heart disease and high blood pressure.

In addition, intermittent fasting has been shown to improve gut health by decreasing intestinal permeability, thereby increasing the diversity of bacteria in the gut.

This study was able to prove that the diversity of bacteria in the intestines of mice increased significantly after only 4 weeks of intermittent fasting.